When asked about his religious beliefs, the Vermont senator said: “I’m very proud to be Jewish. Being Jewish is so much of what I am.”

His father’s relatives were “wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust," he said.

“I know about what crazy and radical and extremist politics mean," he told the crowd. "I learned that lesson as a tiny, tiny child when my mother would take me shopping, and we would see people working in stores who had numbers on their arms because they were in Hitler's concentration camps.

“I'm very proud of being Jewish. And that's an essential part of who I am as a human being.”